Not sure I’d agree, especially for first person shooters.
Sure, you’d been able to play Doom et al over a LAN and so on before Goldeneye, but the intimacy of the experience when you and three close friends are gathered around a single tiny CRT TV was something no Doom LAN deathmatch ever matched for me. Being able to watch your fellow players in real time on the other three quarters of the display also added a dynamic that LAN based shooters rarely had, when every player was hidden behind their own boxy CRT. What’s more this made the experience great even for observers who weren’t playing - at a glance you could watch the state of the entire game and all the players from your seat.
The many fun game modes (Golden gun, Slappers only etc) all contributed to a party style experience that very few other multiplayer games, typically with their much more straight laced approach to gameplay, had. Four player gameplay seems quaint now, but it was a very rare feature in console games prior to the n64, and of course almost always required additional hardware to add the extra ports. I suspect a majority of Playstation owners never even saw a MultiTap adapter, let alone owned one, given how few games could take advantage of it.
Let’s not forget the cost angle here either - while many of us may have been lucky enough to have participated in Doom LAN games, it was a pretty expensive (and technical) undertaking beyond the reach of many people, especially kids, in the mid 90s. Goldeneye was much more affordable and is all the better for it.
Yes, I could say the same about Mario Kart 64, Tribes, Unreal, Quake, or any number of other games, but:
1) This post is about GoldenEye, so that’s what we’re talking about.
2) It doesn’t matter who is first or if other things are similar; it’s undeniable that some games just happen to hit on a certain combination of elements that makes them a hit, and others just don’t, even if they have the same feature list.
3) At the time, most FPS games were single-player with some kind of storyline, with multiplayer being mainly an afterthought. GoldenEye has a pretty good storyline for single-player, so people would buy it for that, and then just happen to have it for the multiplayer. This no doubt contributed to its popularity, as most people just had it around and it turned out to be a great thing to do with friends too.
Local multiplayer had been a thing for ages, of course, but the N64 was something special because it was the first significant console that supported four full controllers (not just paddles) from day 1 without an aftermarket multitap. There was unprecedented four-player support, and simultaneous four-player play is a different experience than passing around two controllers.
It wasn't just Goldeneye, true, but Goldeneye was one of the console's best sellers, it was out within the first year, and it was arguably the first really top-shelf FPS for any console, so it left a big impression.
